NotifyMe! and Unification are bringing notification centers to your Windows Phone without Microsoft’s help

In the last few days, two different independent projects have gained traction to solve one problem: collecting notifications into one central location on Windows Phone. While no third-party answer could be as elegant as some of the concepts, the two solutions — NotifyMe! and Unification — look worthy enough to actually fit the bill for now as long as each can get 3rd party app developers on board.

NotifyMe!

Let’s kick things off with NotifyMe!, the brainchild from Ohio University computer science student Alex White. If we were to boil the concept down to its essence, it’s basically just another Windows Phone 8 lockscreen app which periodically pushes a new image. However, what’s included in that new image is the clever part: notifications.

As you can see in the demo video, new notifications appear on the lockscreen in a customizable banner (similar to a toast notification). You can choose to display up to five notifications on your phone’s lockscreen, plus it bundles in Facebook and Twitter support so anyone can download the app and just use it for that if they like. The real goal is to get 3rd party developers to opt-in to the service, which promises to be “just a few extra lines of code” to make it happen.

Developers interested in supporting the project with their app can check out the free public API, and as an added incentive the NotifyMe! app will feature any apps that support the functionality which could potentially drive more downloads. Like we said, pretty clever.

Unification

However, there is already some friendly competition from an extremely well-established Windows Phone developer: Liquid Daffodil’s Unification. They of course develop Outsider,glƏƏk!, Locksider+, and other innovative apps for Windows Phone, and all of those projects will soon have each of their notifications aggregated inside Unification. That selection plus WPCentral’s popular app adding support for the service at launch should give a nice momentum boost to get the project going.

Image Credit: WPCentral

Much like NotifyMe, the Unification system is open and free for developers to access. Liquid Daffodil also promises it only takes one line of code to implement, and that the system is encrypted. Unification is also a cross-platform affair supporting Windows Phone 7.x, 8.0, and Windows 8. The only downsides we see to the app is that it’s just an app, with no other way to view notifications from anywhere else on the phone besides opening up the app each time.

Developers can request more information and enlist their apps in the beta program by contacting Liquid Daffodil at unifyus@liquiddaffodil.com.

It’s evident that these developers see potential in setting up a third-party solution to notifications, and when you think about it the situation isn’t too different from games using services like OpenXLive to offer Xbox-like features for indie titles. When what you’re given isn’t cutting it for people, there’s room for a substitute to come in and grow. Coincidentally enough, these two projects should be an interesting ‘beta test’ so to speak about how the Windows Phone community responds to the idea of a notification center in the simplistic OS. Clearly there’s some interest, and Microsoft should be paying very close attention to how developers and device owners respond once everything is available. We’ll be sure to let you know when that happens.

Author Description

Saad Hashmi

Founder of Windows Phone Daily. Currently pursuing a Bachelor's degree in Marketing and Information Systems. While procrastinating on that goal I write, play games a little too often, and watch exorbitant amounts of mediocre half-hour comedies because I lack the patience to watch hour-long dramas that are probably better. Follow me on Twitter: @Saad073

Recent Comments

Does it really matter what US network carries this? It's probably the least favoured platform in the US already... their market share is tiny. If they're lucky they might want to emphasize where it's going and when it's getting there in some markets that are already shrinking due to a lack of product.Ms ... half hearted as always...Xin: on AT&T and T-Mobile will carry the Lumia 640 and Lumia 640 XL

Having the tab bar at the top is a big mistake in my eyes -- that's just not going to be friendly for one-handed use, and where Pivots meant you could swipe between sections, that's gone now in favour of swipe to delete.Meanwhile, some apps are putting sections into hamburger menus, which will also be more difficult to reach and arguably reduce user engagement since important sections are now being hidden away from where before they'd be part of a parorama or pivot.I think most of these changes have been made because Microsoft needed a model that'd scale to desktop windowed apps, the old model of pivots and panoramas just wasn't a great fit outside of tablets and phones.Elsewhere, it just doesn't look as nice or as fluid. Windows Phone's UI was designed as a typographic interface where white text was floating in 3D space over a black background (or vice versa), which led to some pretty striking animation as you moved forwards through apps.That's evidently gone, and with Pivots and Panoramas being buried across the board, ModernUI's defining feature is no longer how it works, just how it looks. Except everyone's gone flat now at this stage.Fronkhead: on Modern UI Comparison: Windows 10 versus Windows Phone 8.1